Modern motor vehicles contain numerous control units to which read or write access is effected, such in the course of inspections during a production process or during servicing or maintenance work. In numerous situations that arise during vehicle manufacture or diagnosis, multiple control unit access operations can occur in parallel, i.e., when multiple or multichannel vehicle communication interfaces are used. Here, a control unit or the firmware thereof, or a production environment needs to take account of conditional order dependencies between individual access operations per control unit and between control units. Furthermore, it is frequently not possible for all control unit access operations to take place using any vehicle communication interface or interface resource.
The order dependencies, or flow control models mapping said dependencies, are the subject of frequent adjustments. Additionally, advance planning of control unit access operations is problematic, particularly in view of a diversity of equipment variants which needs to be taken into account during vehicle manufacture. This is because control units arranged in a vehicle which is to be checked are frequently not known before the start of a check and can be ascertained only in the course of the check. Advance planning of the control unit access operations for all possible permutations of equipment characteristics would also be extremely inefficient.
In line with previous solutions, control unit access operations for a standardized subset of control units installed in a vehicle product range are planned manually. In this case, groups of control units are formed. It is possible for control unit access operations to be parallelized between the control units of each group. Outside of the groups, parallel control unit access is not possible for control units which are associated with different groups. This means that control unit access operations can be planned only incompletely and with little resource efficiency.